One Way to Start a Relationship and One Way to Get a Punch in the Face
by Norbit
Summary: Okay, you probably should have realized that hanging out with a dead alien who also might think the two of you are almost-kinda-not-really dating would be weird and difficult! In your tenuous defense, though, you thought the crush thing was in the past. That was maybe not your brightest moment. Johnkat.


**A/N:** God, I think I started writing this back in 2012. I recently went through cleaning out my WIP folder, and, well, I couldn't resist. So here you go, over a year later. This takes place in the dreambubbles while John and Jade and travelling along the Yellow Yard, and concerns their relationships with some of those dreambubble denizens.

* * *

You and Karkat and Nepeta are running through a dreambubble, laughing. Well, actually, you and Nepeta are running through a dreambubble laughing, using your godtier powers to dart around, and you are dragging Karkat around by his arm. He's cursing at you and flailing, and you laugh because he's something like four inches shorter than you anyway, and when you're floating and he's not, it looks like a whole lot more. You try to use the winds to boost the two of you higher, but he gets in a really good punch straight to the jawbone and you lose all concentration, sending the two of you tumbling backward. Nepeta lands beside you and grins at you, her wings fluttering. "That was too cute!" she squeals, "I heard from some of the others that Karkat used to be black fur you, but I'm not sure what you two are – besides purrfectly cute!"

You push yourself up and grin at her. To be totally honest, you've never really gotten used to any of the Nepetas, no matter how weird-alien cute they are; all their shipping seems invasive to you! But after you'd made one of them decaptchalogue her claws on you and her moirail (mwahrail? meowrail? Trolls are confusing!) tense up, Jade had pulled you aside and made it pretty clear what would happen to you if you violated any of the basic rules of troll etiquette again. It would probably be easier if they weren't all dead and you couldn't find a new version of everyone to start over every time you fucked up. "We're just best buds!" you say, and she pouts.

"Bluh! Too boring!" then she grins and pulls down her mask. "Purrhaps I'll have to do something about that, then!"

"No you won't!" Karkat yells, staggering to his feet and pointing an accusatory claw at the two of you. "I won't be ganged up on to get together or whatever you're planning!"

"Ganged up on?" Nepeta giggles, "Oh, that's the best evidence so far!" and rubs her hands together.

You laugh, while Karkat sputters. "You walked into that one, dude!" you say, and give him a best-bros clap on the back. He evens gives you one back! With maybe too much claw and a tad bit too much bared fang, but it's a start!

"Come on, Egbert!" he snaps, turning and heading off somewhere . You think he's a little pissed, but he's like that most of the time. Maybe more pissed than normal?

Either way, you can't tell if he just saw something genuinely cool, or if he's doing the solo stroll into nowhere to see if you'll get bored of him and wander off. If that's the case, then the joke's on him, because Karkat is a pretty fascinating guy regardless of whether he's trying to suplex you (very badly) or showing you identical version of Alternian houses from someone's blurry memory and explaining the symbolism of the architecture (very loudly).

You turn to Nepeta and give her the hey-what-can-you-do shrug along with your most winning grin, the one Davesprite keeps telling you makes you look like a doofus straight from some shitty fifth grade math textbook, but you figure that taking smile advice from anyone who always has bits of sunflower seed in his teeth because he eats the shells like weirdo will lower your charm levels to practically _negative _levels.

"I've got to go," you tell her, already starting to move away in a combination jog and float off. Jogfloat? Joat? You'll have to think of a better word later, but at the moment, Karkat is getting away! If you wait too long, he'll be, like, ten gazillion years in the past or something. Wow, really you have no idea how he keeps finding you! It must be some sort of troll scent superpower. They do seem to have a lot of those.

Nepeta sticks out her tongue at you. It looks like she's just finished eating every sour green apple Jolly Rancher in the whole Furthest Ring, but you guess that's just her funky alien blood.

"Go oooon!" she says. "If he runs off alone he'll be awfurl and upset fur furever and that won't be good fur _anyone_." You take a moment to parse the cat puns, and she adds: "But mostly it'll be bad fur him! So get your butt on it, mister!" She giggles and it reminds you so much of Jade before you remember, oh yeah, she'd been hanging out with the three of you too until she had gotten distracted by a gang of Kanayas.

Then the thought Karkat crashes back to the front of your mind like a five-car collision on the interstate and oh wow, you should get a move on if you to actually find him and not his far-future duplicate. Man, you hate time travel. Especially when you can't tell if it's happening.

"Okay, I gotta go!" you yell, and speed your joat (You hastily trademark the word. Copyright it? Whatever.) up into a full-tilt god tier storm sprint. If you were still on Earth, kids would be lining to buy sports drinks or something with that name. When you finally meet up again, you should get Dave to license it or something, but you don't think it would do much to sell stuff to dead people with imaginary. Another American dream crushed. Ah well.

You round the corner that Karkat disappeared behind and collide with him in a tangle of limbs and hoodie. He grabs your hood for support, nearly strangling you, and you instinctively start to use the Windy Thing, which just throws Karkat up over your shoulder and into your face. This sends the two of you into an interesting midair rollercoaster tumble backwards, except none of the rides at the Wild Waves theme park involved zero supports or being elbowed in the stomach repeatedly. There was about the same amount of screaming, though. There's only so much flailing you can go through before you land in a solidly in a bush, in a totally graceful tumble on both your parts, thank you very much. Ow ow ow you really don't think glasses were meant to shove so far back into your face.

But you can only worry about that for so long because Karkat is standing over you looking exactly like Jade does when she's about to start yelling at a decibel level that would probably impress Dave's turntables. Maybe the two of them cross-pollinated anger methods on a subatomic level or something.

"What the fuck made you think that was funny?" he snaps. "Did you crawl out of the tidal pool where you were spawned an idiot blubbering in your own strangely colored human bodily secretions, or was it the repeated brain damage from colliding into objects as you move towards them like some kind of particularly shittily camouflaged moth?"

"I didn't mean to do that!" you say. The expression on Karkat's face shifts incrementally from "pissed off" to "pissed and incredulous," so you continue as fast you can. "Honest! I mean, you know time is all weird here, so I thought maybe you'd like, trip on a root and fall a couple million years into the past. Then when me and Jade would finally find you again you'd be all old and crotchety."

Karkat looks at you in disbelief. "I'm a ghost, I _can't_ age!"

"Well I was thinking more of being old in spirit, ha ha ha," you say, but he ploughs over you like he's a nineteenth-century farmer tilling the fields and you're the dirt beneath his feet, which isn't that far off if the way he's looking at you is any indication.

"Plus, tripping over a root? That's the kind of stupid mistake that got people culled back on Alternia – in one of the most famous Imperial sitcoms, the legislator the show was about kept a tally of how many times his black interests made mistakes like that and then culled them for incompetence in carrying out their duty. But of course, in your case, your utterly reprehensible fashion choices would have gotten you killed before even your idiocy or your obvious physical flaw of buckteeth – "

"Hey, you have buckteeth too, sorta, even if troll teeth are different than human ones!" you protest, sitting up cross-legged. "And my hood is not stupid, it's useful! I carry snacks in there like all the time!"

Karkat folds his arms and tilts his head back so he can look down his nose at you. He sure looks like he's practiced that, for such a short guy! Maybe he spent a lot of time with younger kids.

"Do I have to add unsanitary living to the list of your offenses?" he asks, in his most long-suffering tone of voice.

You can't help it. You burst out laughing.

Karkat gives a sort of high-pitched screech, like an angry baby bird of prey, and stomps his feet. "Hey!" he cries. "Hey!"

When your laughter has faded to a kind of shuddering snigger up in your nose, which probably only takes a few seconds but seems like it took up a couple millennia in Karkat-time judging from the expression on his face. "It's not really unsanitary," you say, grinning up at him. "It's mostly just junk foods and stuff. I'm not really a captchalogue guru yet because Jade and Davesprite handle most of that stuff and Jade keeps saying that junk food is 'Totally gross!' and 'Tastes really weird!' and it's hard to watch her be so wrong, but more hard to go without chips."

"See, that's exactly what I'm talking about!" Karkat says.

"Wait, what?" you say. "I'm, uh, a bit confused."

"You keep on talking and talking about shit and never even listening to what I have to say!"

"Well, from what I heard, you were mostly listing off ways that people on Alternia would murder me."

Karkat sighs, and you guess he rolls his eyes, but it's really hard to tell without pupils. "No, those were reasons why people on Alternia would kill you, as anyone with verbal skills on par with the average squid would know."

"Maybe tell me why you're mad at me? I mean, more than usual?" you ask.

"Maybe if you actually listened –" he begins.

"I am listening!" you say.

"No you're not!" he snaps. "You are, in fact, talking, unless I've spontaneous developed auditory hallucinations that speak in your voice, which would be just my luck today, what with my arm nearly being ripped off!"

Oh man you don't even want to touch the hallucinations thing, but the other part sounds kinda promising. Or upsetting, you're not really sure.

"Arm ripped off. . ." you venture, standing up and trying to get into the listening spirit and not dissipate into air, even though that would be pretty nice right about now.

"Wow, do you have the short-term memory of a moth as well as the spacial awareness of one?" Karkat says. "You were dragging me along? And flying? And laughing?"

"Uh, I remember that." you say. "I thought you were mostly okay with it? I mean why wouldn't you just dream yourself up flight powers if you were uncomfortable? I don't know, I'm not actually the brightest. That'd probably be Jade."

Karkat looks at you like you just grew extra limbs. "Dream up flight powers? From where?"

"I don't know!" you say, and shrug when he looks like he might just try to punch the flight powers right out of you. "It works like on Prospit, or at least what Jade said Prospit worked like. I think it was the same on Derse? Man, I don't remember what moon you dreamed on, Karkat! That's a little embarrassing – we could be moon buddies and not even know about it!"

"No," he mutters. "I was Prospit. I just didn't really wake up until it was way too late."

"Oh," you say. "Me too!"

Karkat snorts. "You don't need to remind me," he says. "I watched your whole boring life in high-definition."

"It wasn't that boring," you say. "I had some pretty weird stuff happen to me even before SBURB."

"Yeah, well, it was cooler on Alternia," he says. "Back there we had to –"

"Walk twenty miles to school, uphill both ways?" you ask.

"What?" Karkat says, looking at you blankly.

"Is this a thing about snow?" you ask. _Was Alternia really that hot?_

"No, I know about snow, you brainless, whiffle ball-concussed douchebag! I meant, why would you walk to school?"

"It's a bit hard to explain," you say. "But basically it's an Earth ritual of manliness!"

"I don't believe you," Karkat says, crossing his arms. "I'd know about something like that."

"What, like you'd know about the Prospit stuff?" you say, and then immediately regret it. Karkat looks at you like he's planning your messy death, and he probably is. If you had to bet, it'll involve a couple tons of ice cubes and a very hungry badger.

"Karkat, I'm sorry –" you start, but he cuts you off with a snort.

"Well, at least we've got an apology!" he says. "No danger of you turning into a second Vriska here!"

Wait. _Wait_. "You think I'm turning out like Vriska?" you say, and your mind flashes back to pages of blue text admitting to more murders than you think there are episodes of CSI, even with all the series combined.

"Um," Karkat says, and you think this is the first time you've ever seen him struggling to speak. "Sometimes. A bit. You both wear blue, you're both really powerful . . . "

This doesn't seem like enough to come to that particular conclusion, but you wait. No matter what Karkat says, you're pretty good at this listening thing. Your dad read you stories for years, and that honed your deadly ear skills.

"And, well, you're sometimes a jerk really easily. And Vriska would do things a bit like that too, before we all pretty much stopped talking to her in the months before SGRUB."

"Oh," you say. "And because she taught me a lot of stuff?"

"Yeah," Karkat says. "That was a little worrying even at the time."

"I don't think you really have to worry about me acting like Vriska," you say. "Jade will keep me in line! And you too, I guess."

"You just _guess_? I was the one who just told you!" Karkat snaps.

"Heh, definitely you, then," you say, and laugh a little bit. "I really am sorry, you know. I totally thought you could fly."

"That's still the stupidest excuse I've ever heard, and I once heard Gamzee tell Equius that his 'miraculous jams' came from listening to the seashells talk to each other, not from eating too much sopor pie."

"I think that one's way stupider!" you tell him.

There's a still moment, where you think back on the stupid things you just did today, and you guess Karkat is thinking back on other stupid things he's heard in the past.

"Hey, Karkat," you say. "You're not hurt, are you?"

"No," he says. "It takes a lot to really hurt a troll, and even more to hurt a ghost. Anyway, they fade away a lot when I don't think about them. Talk about something else."

"That's the dream magic at work!" you say. "See, Karkat, you can do it already."

He looks at you with an astonishing amount of loathing, but you bet his heart, or his chest pump, or whatever trolls call it, isn't really in it. "If you ever say the word miracles," he says, "I'll skin you alive."

"It would take a lot to do that to a dream!" you say. "Hey, Karkat. I could teach you how to fly."

"Ugh," he says. "Sure. I've fallen too low to do anything but learn how to fly from some weirdo in ill-fitting pajamas."

"These fit perfectly, I'll have you know!" you protest. Then a thought crosses your mind, and you grin. "Hey, Karkat, I have an idea."

"Are you somehow under the impression that if you stop saying my name, I will cease to exist?" Karkat says. "Because I can assure you, I'm pretty tangible."

Ignoring him, you continue. "Once you learn how to fly, we could go flying together!"

Karkat gives you a look of unspeakable horror. Rose, or at least the Horrorterrors, would probably be proud. "I'd rather get an enema in both of my eye sockets," he says at last.

"Ew, I'm pretty sure enemas don't work that way!" you say. "But that was still pretty gross. And I'm not even sure what an enema is!"

"Then another day's work is done," Karkat says, walking on by you.

"Oh, really?" you say. "Ignoring me like that is pretty black of you!"

He freezes in midstep. There's a moment there that is actually kind of awkward, where you look back on the past ten seconds and go, _Oh God, did I really say that? If I died now, it would probably be ruled a just death for saying something so stupid._

Then Karkat turns a little bit, and gives you an actual smile, which you realize is the first one you've ever seen him give anyone, even Jade and Nepeta, and you're pretty sure he likes them a whole lot more than he likes you. "I guess it is," he says. "I bet you can't catch me even flying – I know this neighborhood ten times better than you ever will." Then he breaks off into a sprint.

You're stunned for a moment, and then give chase.

(You can catch him. As it turns out, Karkat can also punch straight through that thin shield of air you were working on. It's the most fun you've had in months.)


End file.
